BLACS

The BLACS (Basic Linear Algebra Communication Subprograms) project is an
ongoing investigation whose purpose is to create a linear algebra
oriented message passing interface that may be implemented efficiently and
uniformly across a large range of distributed memory platforms.

The length of time required to implement efficient distributed memory
algorithms makes it impractical to rewrite programs for every new
parallel machine. The BLACS exist in order to make linear algebra
applications both easier to program and more portable. It is for
this reason that the BLACS are used as the communication layer of
ScaLAPACK.
Key ideas in the BLACS include: